The Envato Market is a very popular source of premium themes and plugins, from their respective subsites: ThemeForest (themes) and CodeCanyon (plugins). Keeping your Envato Market WordPress themes and plugins up to date is important – updating themes and plugins provides security and bug fixes as well as feature updates and other enhancements.

Many users find updating Envato Market items difficult and time-consuming because they assume that the updates need to be downloaded from the Envato Market site and then manually installed, however – this is not the case. Thanks to the (mysteriously under promoted) Envato Market WordPress plugin, it’s possible to auto-update all of your Envato Market themes and plugins. … continues

Awesome! I’ve been waiting to write this one for quite some time. Today we are releasing the biggest update and changes to our standard Managed WordPress Hosting & Support plans, since we first launched as WP NET in 2014! We’re calling it MWP2.0!

Starting today, all new sign ups for Managed WordPress will be deployed to MWP2.0 accounts and include all the MWP2.0 features outlined in this blog post.

Existing customers will be progressively migrated over to MWP2.0-based servers, beginning in around 6 weeks time. If you urgently need some features included in MWP2.0 (like SSL), then please contact us and we’ll do our best to bump you up the line.

All new features and storage space come at no additional cost — Starter 1GB remains $29 per month. To use AutoSSL, you will need a Starter 1GB + SSL plan, which is $39 per month. If you sign up for any hosting service and pay annually you get one month free, every year of the service.

MWP2.0 – New features

Site Clone & Sync — create staging sites in a few clicks

Improved Backups — we now store 7 days of backups (up from 2)

PHP7 – FPM powered versions 5.6, 7 and 7.1

AutoSSL via Let’s Encrypt — never worry about certificate installation or renewals again

We have exciting news today … our Cloud Server Control Panel is officially released and available now!

Our Managed Cloud Servers are built for speed and security. We have gone to considerable lengths to ensure that these servers are as lean as possible — and that includes the control panel. The software installed on the server is very light-weight and uses practically zero resources. As you would expect, all communication between the control panel and the server uses SSL / HTTPS.

We have intentionally made the interface as simple and uncluttered as possible. Most actions require only a few clicks.

Accepting Online Payments in New Zealand

If your launching a WooCommerce site in New Zealand you will inevitably come to a point where you need to decide on a payment processor to use for your online transactions. Of course, there are many options available but the features and costs vary enormously — it can quickly get very confusing. We published a blog post about this some time ago and it’s still the most-read post on our blog. … continues

The WordPress.org blog post has details of what’s new in WordPress 4.4. Generally speaking, this update doesn’t include many changes that WP Admin users will notice — most of the changes in WordPress 4.4 are under the hood (though, they are very exciting changes, none-the-less).

We have already begun testing this version and a few earlier adopter WP NET users will receive the update shortly. Other sites may need to wait a little longer while we test and do the best we can to ensure a smooth upgrade. … continues

Our Managed Cloud VPS customers can start using PHP 7 right away, it’s available immediately (alongside 5.6) to use with your WordPress installations. Just open a support ticket if you would like us to switch any of your Managed Cloud VPS WordPress installations over to PHP7.

In our initial tests with the release version of PHP7 on an Ubuntu Cloud VPS, we get ~40% page load reduction on WP Admin pages.

I just wanted to make a quick mention of this promising new directory for pro / paid WordPress plugins: the Pro Plugin Directory.

Finding free WordPress plugins is a no-brainer … the official WordPress plugins repository contains thousands of free plugins with reviews, ratings and all sorts of useful information to help you make an informed choice. Of course, you can also search the repository from within your WordPress Admin. It works very well and is one of the best things about WordPress — easy discovery, installation and support for free WordPress plugins. … continues

Most of our hosting customers have now been updated to the latest WordPress version: 4.2.1.

Those remaining on v4.1.1 are mostly WooCommerce sites, as we are still completing testing with this plugin and it’s many extensions.

We recommend that WooCommerce users remain on v4.1.4 until we have finished testing WordPress 4.2.x with WooCommerce. The reason for this is to do with taxonomy term splitting in WordPress 4.2+. … continues